In this edition of Gestalt News:
– John Herbert talks about the networking trials of moving to the cloud
– Rich Stroffolino examines if 2018 is the year of the cloud
– Nick Bowie sits down for the IT Origins interview

If data is locked in the datacenter, so are applications. The first step towards overcoming data gravity is to discard the concept of data locality and begin building a new infrastructure. Once data is “there”, in the cloud, applications may begin moving as well.

StarWind offers what they are calling a hardware-based “cloud gateway”, in partnership with AcloudA. I’m honestly surprised a lot of other storage vendors aren’t trying something similar, but I imagine StarWind has done all the hard work on the backend to make this appear deceivingly simple. The basic hardware is a single board with a SATA/SAS interface. This would be connected to your server or storage appliance just like any other drive.